I observed throughout the day yesterday three episodes where my processor gets hijacked for a minute and the memory gets maxed out (12 gigs). The culprit was a seemingly infinite number of tabs being opened in one of the Google Chrome windows with ads: same advertisement in all tabs. I couldn't see the pages but by the tab title I could tell it was ads.

I suspect that this is done by one of the 15-20 chrome extensions I have installed. Most of them are legit popular extensions but some are a little shadier. Is there a way to find the culprit in such a situation? More specifically:

Can I figure out which extension was responsible for opening new tabs without any action from me?

Is there a tool that checks my extensions for ones that are known to be malicious?

Are there are possible culprits that can open tabs in a Google Chrome window outside of Google Chrome?

Next time this happens I'll try to catch a screenshot, or at least jot down the name of the ad in the tab title.

The best way would be to eliminate all the shaddy extensions. If the problem goes away then add one extension at a time, until the problem returns, or it goes away forever.
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RamhoundMar 13 '13 at 14:36

@Ramhound The problem happens rarely enough where that's a highly inefficient process. It's unclear to me what extensions are truly shady. I don't want to just remove them. I installed them for a reason... they're useful.
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Alan TuringMar 13 '13 at 14:42

I will be honest it doesn't sound like an extension that causes this problem.
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RamhoundMar 13 '13 at 14:47